Ebooks, Fiction, Non-Fiction 1000s of Free books
and stories online to read now ~ Main Page

La Befana by T. A. T.

Putting out of the question the Piazza of St. Peter's with
Bernini's encircling colonnades, which is a special thing and
unlike anything else in the world, the Piazza Navona is the
handsomest piazza in Rome. It is situated in the thickest and
busiest part of the city, far out of the usual haunts of the
foreign residents, and nearly in the centre of that portion of
the city which is enclosed between the Corso and the great
curving sweep of the Tiber. It is handsome, not only from its
great space and regular shape—a somewhat elongated double
cube—but from its three fountains richly ornamented with
statuary of no mean artistic excellence, and from the clean and
convenient pavement which, intended for foot-passengers only,
occupies all the space save a carriage-way close to the houses
encircling it. This large extent of pavement, well provided
with benches, and protected from the incursion of carriages,
which make almost every other part of Rome more or less unsafe
for all save the most wide-awake passengers, renders the Piazza
Navona a playground specially adapted for nurses and their
charges, who may generally be seen occupying it in considerable
numbers. But on the occasion on which I wish to call the
reader's attention to it the scene it presents is a very
different and far more locally characteristic one.

We will suppose it to be about midnight on the fifth of
January, the day preceding the well-known revel, now come to be
mainly a children's festival, which English people call Twelfth
Night and celebrate by the consumption of huge plumcakes and
the drawing of lots for the offices of king and queen of the
revels. The Italians call it the festival of the "Befana," the
word being a readily-perceived corruption of "Epifania." Of
course the sense and meaning of the original term have been
entirely forgotten, and the Befana of the Italian populace is a
sort of witch, mainly benevolent indeed, and especially
friendly to children, to whom in the course of the night she
brings presents, to be found by them in the morning in a
stocking or a shoe or any other such fantastic hiding-place.
But Italians are all more or less children of a larger growth,
and at Rome especially the populace of all ages, ever ready for
circenses in any form, make a point of "keeping" the
festival of the Befana, who holds her high court on her own
night in the Piazza Navona.

We will betake ourselves thither about midnight, as I have
said. It is a bitterly cold night, and the stars are shining
brilliantly in the clear, steely-looking sky—such a night
as Rome has still occasionally at this time of year, and as she
used to have more frequently when Horace spoke of incautious
early risers getting nipped by the cold. One of the first
things that strikes us as we make our way to the place of
general rendezvous muffled in our thickest and heaviest cloaks
and shawls is the apparent insensibility of this people to the
cold. One would have expected it to be just the reverse. But
whether it be that their organisms have stored up such a
quantity of sunshine during the summer as enables them to defy
the winter's cold, or whether their Southern blood runs more
rapidly in their veins, it is certain that men, women and
children—and especially the women—will for
amusement's sake expose themselves to a degree of cold and
inclement weather that a Northerner would shrink from.

For some days previously, in preparation for the annual
revel, a series of temporary booths have by special permission
of the municipality been erected around the piazza. In these
will be sold every kind of children's toys—of the more
ordinary sorts, that is to say; for Roman children have never
yet been rendered fastidious in this respect by the artistic
inventions that have been provided for more civilized but
perhaps not happier childhood. There will also be a store of
masks, colored dominoes, harlequins' dresses, monstrous and
outrageous pasteboard noses, and, especially and above all,
every kind of contrivance for making a noise. In this latter
kind the peculiar and characteristic specialty of the day are
straight tin trumpets some four or five feet in length. These
are in universal request among
young and old; and the general preference for them is
justified by the peculiarly painful character of the note
which they produce. It is a very loud and vibrating sound of
the harshest possible quality. One feels when hearing it as
if the French phrase of "skinning the ears" were not a
metaphorical but a literal description of the result of
listening to the sound. And when hundreds of blowers of
these are wandering about the streets in all parts of the
town, but especially in the neighborhood of the Piazza
Navona, making night hideous with their braying, it may be
imagined that those who go to their beds instead of doing
homage to the Befana have not a very good time of it
there.

It is a curious thing that the Italians, who are denizens of
"the land of song," should take especial delight in mere
abundance of discordant noise. Yet such is unquestionably the
case. They are in their festive hours the most noisy people on
earth. And the farther southward you go the more pronounced and
marked is the propensity. You may hear boys and men imitating
the most inharmonious and vociferous street-cries solely for
the purpose of exercising their lungs and making a noise. The
criers of the newspapers in the streets must take an
enthusiastic delight in their trade; and I have heard boys in
the street who had no papers to sell, and nothing on earth to
do with the business, screaming out the names of the different
papers at the hour of their distribution at the utmost stretch
of their voices, and for no reason on earth save the pleasure
of doing it—just as one cock begins to crow when he hears
another.

The crowd on the piazza is so thick and close-packed that it
is a difficult matter to move in any direction when you are
once within it, but good-humor and courtesy are universal. An
Italian crowd is always the best-behaved crowd in the
world—partly, I take it, from the natural patience of the
people, and the fact that nobody is ever in a hurry to move
from the place in which he may happen to be; and partly as a
consequence of the general sobriety. Even on such a night of
saturnalia as this of the Befana very little drunkenness is to
be seen. Although the crowd is so dense that every one's
shoulder is closely pressed against that of his neighbor, there
is a great deal of dancing going on. Here and there a ring is
formed, carved out, as it were, from the solid mass of human
beings, in which some half dozen couples are revolving more or
less in time to the braying of a bagpipe or scraping of a
fiddle, executing something which has more or less semblance to
a waltz. The mode in which these rings are formed is at once
simple and efficacious. Any couple who feel disposed to dance
link themselves together and begin to bump themselves against
their immediate neighbors. These accept the intimation with the
most perfect good-humor, and assist in shoving back those
behind them. A space is thus gained in the first instance
barely enough for the original couple to gyrate in. But by
violently and persistently dancing up against the foremost of
the little ring the area is gradually enlarged: first one other
couple and then another are moved to follow the example, and
they in their turn assist in bumping out the limits of the ring
till it has become some twenty feet or so in diameter. These
impromptu ball-rooms rarely much exceed that size, but dozens
of them may be found in the course of one's peregrinations
around the large piazza. The occupants of some of them will be
found to consist of town-bred Romans, and those of others of
people from the country. There is no mistaking them one for the
other, and the two elements rarely mingle together. The
differences to be observed in the bearing and ways of the two
are not a little amusing, and often suggestive of
considerations not uninstructive to the sociologist. The
probabilities are that the music in the case of the first
mentioned of the above classes will be found to consist of a
fiddle—in that of the latter, of a bagpipe, the old
classical cornamusa, which has been the national
instrument of the hill-country around the Campagna for it would
be dangerous to say how
many generations. In either case there seems to be an intimate
connection between the music and the spirit of the public for
which it is provided. The peasant of the Campagna and of the
Latian, Alban and Sabine hills takes his pleasure, even that of
the dance, as an impertinent Frenchman said of us Anglo-Saxons,
moult tristement. That indescribable air of sadness
which, as so many observers have concurred in noting, broods
over the district which they inhabit seems to have communicated
itself to the inmost nature and character of the populations.
They are a stern, sad, sombre and silent race, for what I have
said above of a tendency to noisiness and vociferation must be
understood to apply to the town-populations only. Their dance
is generally much slower than that of the city-folk. In these
latter days increased communication has taught some of them to
assimilate their dancing with more or less successful imitation
to the waltz, but in many cases these parties of peasants may
still be seen practicing the old dances, now wholly unknown in
the city. But whether they are keeping to their old figures and
methods or endeavoring to follow new ones, the difference in
their bearing is equally striking. The dancing of peasants must
necessarily be for the most part heavy and awkward, but despite
this the men of the Campagna and the hills are frequently not
without a certain dignity of bearing, and the women often,
though perhaps not quite so frequently, far from devoid of
grace. Especially may the former quality be observed if, as is
likely, the dancers belong to the class of mounted herdsmen,
who pass their lives on horseback, and whose exclusive duty it
is to tend the herds of half-wild cattle that roam over the
plains around Rome. These are the "butteri" of whom I wrote on
a former occasion in these pages—the aristocracy of the
Campagna. And it is likely that dancers on the Piazza Navona on
a Befana night should belong to this class, for the Campagna
shepherd is probably too poor, too abject and too little
civilized to indulge in any such pastime.

Little of either grace or dignity will be observed in the
Terpsichorean efforts of the Roman plebs of the present
day. Lightness, brio, enjoyment and an infinite amount
of "go" may be seen, and plenty of laughter heard, and
"lazzi"—sallies more or less imbued with wit, or at least
fun, and more or less repeatable to ears polite. But there is a
continual tendency in the dancing to pass into horse-play and
romping which would not be observed among the peasantry. In a
word, there is a touch of blackguardism in the city circles,
which phase could not with any justice or propriety be applied
to the country parties.

But it is time to go home. The moon is waning: suadentque
cadentia sidera somnum, if only there were any hope of
being able to be persuaded by their reasonable suggestions. But
truly the town seems to afford little hope of it. We make our
way out of the crowd with some difficulty and more patience,
and are sensible of a colder nip in the January night-air as we
emerge from it into the neighboring streets. But even there,
though the racket gradually becomes less as we leave the piazza
behind us, there is in every street the braying of those
abominable tin trumpets, and we shall probably turn wearily in
our beds at three or four in the morning and thank Heaven that
the Befana visits us but once a year.